Using publicly published data from Congressional Quarterly, we averaged a
couple of different types of scores that they published, looking at all votes
going back to January 1, 1991. After going through a number of steps and gyrations,
we came up with a list of eleven hard-core progressive United States Senators
(11% of that body) and 37 hard-core progressive United States Representatives
(about 9% of that body). The algorithm that we've used to come up with these
progressive scores is as follows: We take ANY VOTE in which a majority of the
progressives we've identified--so in the House say, if there were no absences,
it would be 19 of 37--voted in opposition to a majority of the Republican
caucus and have that vote qualify for the database. The same process is used in
the Senate. So, non-ideological votes such as National Groundhog Day: 429-0
with 6 absences, do not qualify for the database. ANY vote in which a majority
of progressives in the progressive cohort listed just below here votes against
a majority of Republicans qualifies for the database and is included in the Overall % scores.

"The Progressive Position" by definition, is the position of the
majority of the Progressives. The “Conservative Position” is the position of the
majority of the Republicans. We’ve tested this algorithm in the real world and
it works extremely well. In the case of members of Congress elected before
November 1990, the “Progressive Lifetime Scores” include only votes cast in
Congress since January 1, 1991 (1991-92 was the first full Congress where vote
records were computerized). In the case of members of Congress elected on or
after November 1990, the scores include all votes that have ever been cast
while that member has been in Congress. The column labeled “Progressive ‘15-‘16
Scores” is for the current Congress and shows scores for votes since January
2015, which allows for an apples-to-apples comparison for the same time period
of all current members of Congress. For example, the total number of qualifying
votes according to this criteria in 2007 was 747 in the House and 269 in the
Senate. After we catch up with a programming backlog, we will post the specific
roll call vote numbers of the votes that qualified for inclusion on Progressive
Punch scores. The composite scores include ALL votes qualified by our
algorithm, whether we've written the narrative vote descriptions that allow us
to put them into categories or not. So the category scores can look different
from the composite scores.

The votes used to calculate the scores in the Crucial Votes % columns
are a subset of the overall votes that qualify according to the Progressive
Punch algorithm described above. They show the impact that even a small number
of Democrats have when they defect from the progressive position. Crucial
Votes are really “where were you when we needed you” votes. The Crucial
Votes % categories include all roll call votes where the margin between
yes votes and no votes was narrow and could have been changed by a small
group of Democrats voting differently. Narrow margins are defined as votes
in which the winning side came out ahead by 20 votes or fewer in the House (so
a shift of 10 votes from one side to the other would have changed the result)
or by 6 votes or fewer in the Senate (so a shift of 3 votes from one side to
the other would have changed the result).

Similarly, we treat absences differently depending on whether the vote was
close. If the absence was on a vote where the overall margin was less than or
equal to 20 votes in the House or six in the Senate then we count it as a “bad”
vote, which gets counted against the member's score. However, if the margin was
greater than 20 votes — say, 320–80 — then we remove the absence from the
numerator and denominator, and it won't count at all. Conversely, if a member
votes “Present” rather than “Yea” or “Nay,” we will always count that as a bad
vote as long as the vote qualifies for the data base at all.

Prior to 2011, we had also included in the Crucial Votes % category any
vote in which the progressive side was on the losing side, irrespective of how
close the vote was. However when Republicans are in a majority in either the
House or Senate — due to their strong ideological cohesion in their voting
patterns — they're almost invariably on the winning side. That is to say they
stick together and when they're in a majority that sticking together is enough
for them to win most of the time. So we're actually using slightly different
methodology for determining which votes fall in the Crucial Votes %
category when the vote isn't a close vote. In situations where the
Democrats are in control of a legislative body — as was the case with the US
Senate for 2013–2014 — we continue to classify as Crucial any vote in
which the progressive side was on the losing side, in addition to all close
votes as defined above. However, in situations where the Republicans
control a legislative body — as is the case with both the US Senate & the
US House of Representatives for 2015–2016 — we classify votes where at least
three-quarters of the progressive cohort listed just below voted against the
Republicans AND at the same time at least 10% of the Democratic Caucus
voted with the Republicans as a Crucial Vote, along with still including
all close votes as well. In other words “Crucial” votes are votes in which
there was strong progressive cohesion and at the same time a significant
defection on the part of more conservative Democrats to the Republicans.
Summing all this up, “where were you when we needed you” votes would probably
be a better title for this column than Crucial Votes % but the word
crucial fits much more easily at the top of a column. We have made this
calculation retroactive to all previous periods where the Republicans
controlled the Senate or the House in the past; this change affected Members'
Lifetime Crucial Votes % scores very minimally.

There is no surefire objective way to compute how progressive, or for that
matter how conservative, a member of Congress is. A lot of thought went into
coming up with this methodology. That doesn't mean it can't be critiqued. What
we have done is to try to take human beings out of the equation as much as
possible. In other words, the percentages calculated on this site do not
necessarily correlate with the individual political positions of Joshua
Grossman, the primary author of this website. There are some criticisms that
could be levied against our methodology. One is that it treats every vote
equally, when they're obviously not all equally important. Another is that
lonely principled stands, that might be viewed by some as progressive, such as
Barbara Lee's sole vote against war in Afghanistan, do not qualify for the
database, because not enough Progressives rallied around her flag (no pun
intended). One other thing that no voting index can measure is intensity of
support/leadership.

The research functions currently available on this site are just the first
step in terms of what we plan to make available to the public.